Last Run Ever-brash Bill Johnson thought he could regain his gold medal form at 41 and win back his wife. Then he crashed

At her home in Gresham, Ore., DB Johnson reaches into her sonBill's small duffel and pulls out a black pouch. It's a cheapcloth case for ski goggles, not a personal treasure. "I don'tlike to go through his stuff," she says, carefully loosening thedrawstring, "but someone has to look after his affairs now. Thisis one of the things I found."

She hands over the gold medal Bill won in the 1984 WinterOlympics downhill. He was a brash, recalcitrant 23-year-old whenhe shocked the world in Sarajevo by becoming the first Americanto win skiing's most coveted medal. "He left it in his truck,unlocked, in that bag," his mother says. "He likes it for show,but somehow or other he doesn't cherish it. He's careless withit."

Family and friends know the 41-year-old Johnson has been carelesswith many things since that Olympic victory. His marriage. Hismoney. His reputation. His prospects. Recently divorced, brokeand behind in his child-support payments, living out of an RV,Johnson was at rock bottom last summer when he decided to returnto serious ski racing in hopes of making the U.S. team for the2002 Games. To some observers it seemed a quixotic attempt torecapture lost glory, but to his many supporters it was an honestreturn to his roots. "He was starting over with what he knewbest," says his ex-wife, Gina Johnson, 36, "and he was in thebest shape I'd seen him in years, maybe ever."

"When I heard he wanted to make a comeback, my reaction was, he'sgot the talent--anything's possible if he gets into bombproofshape," says his former coach, Erik Steinberg. "But I told himthere's a reason people don't come back to downhill racing at 40.Mark Spitz tries a comeback, and what's the worst that can happento him? In our sport people can kill themselves."

Johnson has never been good at listening to viewpoints thatdiffer from his own. On March 22 he nearly did kill himself,suffering a horrific fall in a practice run at the U.S. AlpineChampionships at Montana's Big Mountain resort. As of Monday hewas still in a coma at nearby Kalispell Regional Medical Center.

Johnson crashed when he caught an edge at more than 50 mph andhurtled facefirst into the icy slope. He nearly bit through histongue while tumbling through two safety nets. Medics at thescene kept him from suffocating in his own blood by forcing atracheal tube down his throat, and he later underwent four hoursof surgery to alleviate the pressure on his brain caused byinternal hemorrhaging. "We were told he had a 25 percent chanceof living when they first brought him in," says Gina, who was ather house in Sonoma, Calif., waiting for her and Bill's two boys,Nicholas, 8, and Tyler, 7, to get home from baseball practicewhen she called the hospital for information on her ex-husband'scondition. "I asked when I should bring the boys to see Bill, andthey said, 'Don't wait. Come now.'"

While doctors are hopeful Johnson will make what they call a"meaningful recovery," they acknowledge it's difficult to predictwhat that will be. Friends and relatives are convinced thatJohnson, who can open his eyes but does not respond to direction,is aware of their presence at some level when they visit him."He's like a newborn baby lying on his back, moving his arms andlegs around and not knowing why," says DB, to whom Bill hadn'tspoken for more than a year before his crash in a dispute overmoney he felt she owed him. "He doesn't have a pot to pee in,"she says sadly. "The last time we spoke, he told me I wasresponsible for all the bad things that had happened in his life:the death of his first son, his divorce, his being broke. I guesshe needs a scapegoat. He's not man enough to take responsibilityfor his misdeeds."

Johnson's past includes more than a few misdeeds, among them hisarrest at 17 for stealing a car. Sharp-tongued and carrying aworld-class chip on his shoulder, Johnson was a loner who wouldfight at the drop of a hat. Twice he was removed from his youthski team in Oregon for fighting, and a few months before the '84Olympics he punched Andy Chambers, a teammate on the U.S. SkiTeam, in the jaw. "He'd pick fights all the time during dry-landtraining when we were playing basketball or touch football,"recalls Steinberg, who also came to blows with Johnson a coupleof times. "It was his personality. He was always testing us,putting us in situations in which we had to come down on him likea ton of bricks."

As recently as March 2000, Johnson got into a barroom skirmish inJackson Hole, Wyo., in which he allegedly punched a woman and bita man on the arm at the Mangy Moose saloon. After leaving thebar, according to the police report, Johnson was found walkingalong a highway and was arrested for public intoxication andinterfering with an officer. He spent the night in jail. When hefailed to appear for his hearing last April, a warrant was issuedfor his arrest. The warrant is still outstanding.

"Bill's always been a fighter," DB says. "When he was eight, hewas expelled from his school in Boise for kicking the principal.He got straight A's in class and straight F's on the playground.I used to tell him he needed to take a Dale Carnegie class, buthe didn't want to hear about it."

Bill's friends--and he has many--will tell you that beneath hisabrasive exterior lives a sensitive man who was deeply scarred bythe separation of DB from his father, Wally, when Bill was 14."Like a lot of people who are strong and self-confident,underneath maybe he wasn't that way," says Billy Kidd, the 1964Olympic silver medalist in the slalom.

"Bill was generous and loving," says Gina, who met Johnson in1986 and married him the next year. "He had a hard childhood.When his family was splitting up, he was left alone a lot, andhis dad was a serious alcoholic. Bill had a hard time trustingpeople."

Financially, that proved costly. After brazenly telling the worldthat his gold medal meant "millions, we're talking millions,"Johnson had Wally, who'd been in the construction business, actas his manager. "Wally saw dollar signs, and Bill wanted to takecare of him," DB says. "He paid his father $3,000 a month to livein his house in Malibu and make deals for him. Lots of peoplecame to them with offers, but greed got in the way; they demandedtoo much, and the offers went away. By the time I got involved,it was a joke trying to get anyone to listen to me."

DB took over as Bill's manager in 1986, but his skiing career wasalready in a downward spiral. After winning three World Cupdownhills and the Olympic gold in '84, Johnson never won a medalon the World Cup circuit again. He retired from the U.S. Ski Teamin the spring of '90, and that fall his and Gina's first son,Ryan, was born.

The plan was to move to Crested Butte, Colo., where Bill hadaccepted a job as a resort's ski ambassador for $35,000 a yearand intended to build houses in partnership with Gina's father,Dennis Ricci. However, a month before the move, tragedy struck.In November 1991, while Gina was taking a shower, 13-month-oldRyan drowned after falling into a hot tub at their house in LakeTahoe, Calif. A guest had used the tub and left the sliding dooropen, and Bill didn't notice Ryan crawl outside. Ryan was kept onlife support for three weeks before Bill and Gina made thedecision to pull the plug.

Given what had happened, the move to Crested Butte was a welcomenew start. Both Nicholas and Tyler were born while the Johnsonswere living there, but Bill gradually grew disenchanted. "He gothis contractor's license and got all excited about housebuilding," Gina says, "but then he discovered, Wow, this is a lotof work. He grew restless. He wanted more."

Johnson was competing half a dozen times a year in legends' racesagainst the likes of Kidd and Stein Erickson, earning a minimumappearance fee of $7,500 per race, but he was frustrated byseveral aspects of the events, including the handicap system,which gave the older skiers significant time advantages. So hequit. "We argued about that," Gina says. "I wanted him to do itfor the income, but he didn't want to, and if Bill didn't want todo something, he wouldn't do it. He didn't worry about things. Iwanted a plan and stability. I wanted him to grow up. He'd say,'I don't want to grow up. It's no fun.'"

After his contract with the Crested Butte resort expired in 1995,Johnson, a two-handicap golfer, wanted to try to qualify for thePGA Tour. He sold the family's 3,400-square-foot trailside home,which he had built with his father-in-law, for $450,000 andbought a 37 1/2-foot RV. He and Gina loaded the kids and the dog,Siskiyou, an Alaskan malamute, into the RV and spent six monthstraveling from golf course to golf course, mostly in California,practicing. "Finally I put my foot down and told Bill I couldn'tlive like that anymore," says Gina, who now supports herself asan orthodontist's assistant. "I needed a house. He'd tell me Iwasn't the girl he'd married. No. I wasn't 21 anymore, and I hadtwo kids."

They bought a home in San Diego in July 1996, and Bill, an avidcomputer user, began day trading. Up one day, down the next: Itdrove Gina crazy. "I thought of it as gambling," she says. Billwas still working on his golf game and occasionally skiing atpro-am events and on the Legends circuit. "At that point he'dgone through most of our money," Gina says. "He hadn't worked intwo years, and we had mortgage payments on the house and the RV.He could have done television commentary. He could have coached,run ski camps, done something with computers. But he wasn'tcontent with the normal way of life. He liked to live out of asuitcase. He didn't want that little check every week. He wantedthe big money."

Gina filed for legal separation in November 1998. "He was in andout of the house for the next year and a half," she says. "Hethought I'd fall apart and want him back. I think he was in shockwhen I finally moved back home, to my uncle's farm in Sonoma."

Soon after she left him, in December 1999, Bill went to a tattooparty and had SKI TO DIE--which was how he inscribed hisposters--tattooed above his right biceps. He drove the RV to SquawValley, Calif., where he made money as a part-time electrician.After the divorce went through last August, however, he decidedhe needed to go back to what he did best, what made him happiest.He would shock the world again by qualifying for the Olympics andwinning a medal, and in so doing he would win back Gina and theboys. He told her she'd better be there when he crossed thefinish line.

If the dream was delusional, it was gilded by a purity of purposethat wasn't lost on the skiing community. Johnson's comebackwasn't a joke. It was in many ways inspirational, especially tothe current generation of American racers, to whom Johnson is anicon. "He was chasing a dream that he knew wasn't necessarilygoing to happen," says Chad Fleisher, a top U.S. downhiller. "Hedidn't seem bitter about it. He seemed happy to be there and tobe racing. That was cool."

For all his faults, Johnson commands a surprisingly fierceloyalty, even from those he has disappointed or hurt. That hischeckered story has touched people is apparent from the hundredsof letters and e-mails pouring into the hospital and from thestream of friends who've appeared at his bedside, telling him oldtales of their high jinks, trying to spark a light of recognitionin his eyes. "I was sitting at his bedside, reading him all thesee-mails, thinking, Come on, Bill, wake up," Gina says. "We alllove you. Now grow up."

A lot of people are praying he gets another chance.

COLOR PHOTO: TONY TOMSIC Last Run At 41, brash Bill Johnson thought he could regain his gold medal form from the Sarajevo Olympics (above) and win back his wife. Then he crashed [T of C]COLOR PHOTO: JONATHAN SELKOWITZ/NEWSPORT Words of warning Just a week before his near-fatal fall, Johnson showed off the daredevil motto tattooed on his arm: SKI TO DIE.FOUR COLOR PHOTOS: ERIC EINHORN/AP (4) Out of control Johnson's horrific facefirst plunge left him in a coma and Gina (with Nicholas, near right, and Tyler) praying that he'll recover.COLOR PHOTO: JOHN BURGESS [See caption above]

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